News

Real Lives

Douglas Macdonald, scientist

When I was an undergraduate at Aberdeen university I worked on a project tracking competitive swimmers. I used computer technology to analyse their strokes and that got me thinking about how computers “see” and how that could be used in other areas of life.

It dawned on me that computer vision, as it’s known, could be used to develop an intelligent video surveillance system for the security industry. I used to work as a retail security guard, so I had some inside knowledge. I used that to work out how I could come up with a better solution to the problem of shoplifters or other criminals.

Computers are already used in this way for vehicle number-plate recognition, for example, or fingerprint matching. But when you compare a computer to the human eye and brain, you appreciate just how many skills we have that computers can’t compete with. Computers are good